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Early queen rearing

How early in the year can I start raising queens? Since I'm in Texas and other people reading this on here that are located in other areas may have the same question, what would be the conditions needed to start raising queens?

Re: Early queen rearing

Some time around mid April. Depending on the weather, the earliest Texas queen producers offer queens early to mid April, I doubt you could succeed earlier since the weather 100-125 miles South of you is quite different than your March and April weather. The trick is to have mature drones around for the mating, that takes about a week longer than a queen. HTH

LeeB
I try to learn from my mistakes, and from yours when you give me a heads up :)

Re: Early queen rearing

I can have queens in mating nucs here by may, and have queens being mated in GA in march, so I am assuming that you should be able to have queens in mating nucs by April 1st and get well mated queens. A good rule of thumb is you can graft when you have drone brood in the purple eye stage of development.

Re: Early queen rearing

A "Rule" that Dr. Larry Conner goes by is when you see purple eye stage growth drones in you colonies that is when you should start grafting and raising queens. Then the drones will be mature enough to mate w/ the virgin queens.

Re: Early queen rearing

>Why do I have to wait until there are a lot of drones flying? Is there only a few days the queen can mate after she comes out of the cell?

In my experience the bees are not in the mood to raise a lot of good queens until there are a lot of drones flying. It indicates it is the correct time of year, and that resources are good and the queens will be well fed. It also indicates they will be well mated. Yes, she can only mate for the first three weeks and after that she will be a drone layer. But preferably she will not just find a few drones, but a lot of drones and get multple matings on multple trips and be really well mated as well as really well fed while she is developing.